April 24, 2016

During its long, successful original run on NBC, from 1989 to 1998, the Seinfeld TV show created or popularized many catchphrases.

Some of the best known are: ● the famed snub of the “Soup Nazi,”“No soup for you!” ● the sexual euphemism “master of your domain” ● the food-related faux pas term “double dip” ● and, the handy denial of prejudice, “Not that there's anything wrong with that.”

My own favorite Seinfeld catchphrase is “Yada yada yada.”

It was first used in the episode that originally aired on April 24, 1997, appropriately titled“The Yada Yada” (Season 8, Episode 19).

In that episode, the phrase is initially used by the character Marcy (played by Suzanne Cryer), a girlfriend of George Costanza(Jason Alexander), while she’s talking to George and Jerry Seinfeld.

As the episode proceeds, almost all the characters start using “yada yada yada” (or sometimes just “yada” or “yada yada”) as a way to gloss over and shorten descriptions of things, much like people use “et cetera, et cetera” or “blah blah blah” or “and so on, and so forth.”

MARCY: So I'm on Third Avenue, minding my own business and, yada yada yada, I get a free massage and a facial. GEORGE: Wow. What a succinct story. MARCY: I’m surprised you drive a Cadillac. GEORGE: Oh, it’s not mine. It’s my mother’s. MARCY: Oh. Are you close with your parents? GEORGE: Well, they gave birth to me, and, yada yada. MARCY: Yada what? GEORGE: Yada yada yada…

“The Yada Yada” script was written by veteran TV writer and producer Steve Koren, a former member of the Saturday Night Live writing team who wrote or co-wrote dozens of other Seinfeld episodes. He also scripted a number of popular movies, including Bruce Almighty, Click, Superstar and A Night at the Roxbury.

In the Norwegian language, the letter J is pronounced as Y. So, the Norwegian word “jada,” meaning “yeah,” is pronounced as “yada.” And, “jada jada jada” is used by Norwegians in the same disbelieving or dismissive way English-speaking people use “yeah yeah yeah.” (As in, “Yeah, sure.”)

The bottom line when you read all the yada yada yada in the various theories is that the linguistic origin is uncertain.

What is certain is that the Seinfeld show gets and deserves the credit for making “yada yada yada” familiar to millions of people.

And, although the one and only appearance of the character Marcy in the Seinfeld show was in “The Yada Yada” episode of Season 8, she gets the credit for being the first Seinfeld character to use that now immortal catchphrase.

April 19, 2016

On April 19, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur made a high-profile “farewell address” to a joint meeting of both houses of Congress.

Eight days earlier, he’d been fired as the top commander of the American forces in the Korean War by President Harry Truman, essentially for having the gall to publicly criticize Truman’s denial of his request to nuke Red China (in retaliation for sending troops to fight against the U.S. in Korea).

Truman later famously explained:“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was.”

Today, with hindsight, most people would likely support Truman’s decision to avoid World War III and affirm the authority of the Commander-in-Chief.

But in 1951, Truman’s firing of MacArthur was highly controversial — and highly politicized by Truman’s Republican adversaries.

MacArthur was one of America’s most renowned generals during World War II.

Among other things, he was known for making and ultimately keeping the legendary vow “I shall return!” — his promise to return to liberate the Philippines from Japanese control after being forced to escape and leave many of his troops there early in 1942.

On September 2, 1945, MacArthur presided over the official surrender of the Japanese, thus ending that war. He then oversaw the American occupation and initial peacetime revitalization of Japan.

In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, President Truman tapped MacArthur as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces who were fighting with South Korea against the North Koreans and their backer, Communist Red China.

MacArthur was well-known and well-liked by most Americans and many believed that the spread of Communism had to be stopped to prevent a “domino effect.”

He ominously warned that if Communism were allowed to spread in Southeast Asia it would “threaten the freedom of the Philippines and the loss of Japan and might well force our western frontier back to the coast of California, Oregon and Washington.”

Most of that Cold War rhetoric is now forgotten. The thing that is most remembered from MacArthur’s speech is his famous quote: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

It was part of the closing of his address, in which he said:

“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that ‘old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’ And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.”

As MacArthur noted, the line “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” is not something he coined. It comes from a song that was popular with British soldiers during World War I, called “Old Soldiers Never Die.”

The barracks room song was a parody of the hymn “Kind Words Never Die.” And, unlike the ending of MacArthur’s farewell address, the lyrics of the Army song are more satiric than schmaltzy.

There are several different versions. Here are the lyrics recorded by the late, great quote and phrase maven Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases:

“Old soldiers never die, Never die, never die, Old soldiers never die — They simply fade away.

Old soldiers never die, Never die, never die, Old soldiers never die — Young ones wish they would.”

Ironically, that and other early versions of the song poked fun at Army life and at career soldiers and officers like MacArthur.

However, after MacArthur cited the song in his farewell speech, Gene Autry rewrote the lyrics to create a more respectful version that specifically praised the general. The last verse of Autry’s rendition says:

“Now somewhere, there stands the man His duty o’er and won The world will ne’er forget him To him we say, ‘Well done.’”

President Truman had a different reaction to MacArthur’s farewell speech.

April 15, 2016

America’s federal income tax was first created by Congress in 1861, to help fund the Union Army during the Civil War.

The original deadline set for paying the tax was June 30.

In 1895, that first Federal income tax law was declared unconstitutional and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This little legal problem was fixed in 1913 when the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified.

The tax deadline was then set as March 1.

In 1918, it was moved to March 15.

Then, in 1955, the traditional date for filing tax returns was changed to April 15, a now long-dreaded date that has come to be known as “Tax Day.”

If the process of filling out and sending your income tax return to the Internal Revenue Service gives you heartburn, then a famous advertising slogan linked to the date April 15th will strike you as appropriate.

In 1976, Miles Laboratories filed a trademark application to protect the slogan it had been using to promote Alka-Seltzer, the “effervescent analgesic alkalizing tablets” the company first began selling in 1931.

The slogan was used in Alka Seltzer TV commercials in the 1960s. But for some reason unknown to me the legal anniversary of it’s use as a “Word Mark” for trademark purposes came later.

I can’t explain why that date was used for legal reasons. But it does strike me as ironic that it’s the same as the legal date for “Tax Day.”

Unless you’re too young, you probably know the words in this “Word Mark.”

They were initially used in a jingle sung by Speedy, the animated star of Alka Seltzer’s TV commercials, and continued to be sung, spoken and printed in Alka Seltzer ads for years:

“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, Oh, what a relief it is!”

As some aficionados of obscure rock trivia know, the music for the famed Alka Seltzer jingle was written by Thomas W. Dawes, a founding member of The Cyrkle.

The Cyrkle was the Sixties rock music group best known for their hits “Red Rubber Ball”(written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley) and “Turn Down Day.”

Dawes later wrote many other jingles used in ads for other products, including 7-Up (“7Up, the Uncola”), L’Eggs (“Our L’eggs fit your legs), McDonald’s (“You, You’re the One”) and Vidal Sassoon’s hair care line (“If You Don’t Look Good, We Don’t Look Good”).

Anyway, next time you get heartburn as you fill out your federal income taxes, queue up a vintage Alka-Seltzer TV ad on YouTube, pop a couple tablets, and sing along with Speedy.

LaPierre’s use of the phrase “jack-booted government thugs” was his metaphorical way of equating BATF officials with Nazis.

During the early part of World War II, before leather shortages developed, German soldiers wore distinctive military “jack boots.”

Since then, the name of those high leather boots has been commonly used as a symbolic reference to totalitarian governments.

On April 19, 1995, just six days after LaPierre sent out his NRA fundraising letter, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City was destroyed by a bomb, killing 168 people.

It was later discovered that the conspirators behind the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were also angry over gun control laws and the federal government’s involvement in the Ruby Ridge and Waco tragedies.

Gun control advocates suggested that the inflammatory rhetoric in LaPierre’s letter had encouraged the bombing.

“LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau…because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Today, the phrase is still being cited in articles and commentary about gun control, the NRA and LaPierre.

A January 5, 2016 editorial in the New York Daily News about the continued opposition to gun control by the NRA and its political allies, despite the recent wave of mass shootings in schools and other public places, reminded readers:

“Just one month before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre railed against ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Of course, in the view of NRA members, guns and ill-advised words don’t kill people — ill people do.

Referring to the Republican-dominated Congress (which he memorably dubbed the “Do Nothing Congress”) to and Thomas E. Dewey, his Republican opponent in the 1948 election, Truman purportedly said:“I don’t give them hell. I tell the truth and they think it’s hell.”

Some people today think of Truman as being more of a “statesman” than recent crops of politicians, in the sense of somehow being more above rough-and-tumble political maneuvering and clashes.

Given the craziness of the 2016 presidential campaign, it’s not hard to believe.

However, I suspect that if Truman were still alive and someone asked him about the difference between a politician and a statesman, he would recycle the famous definition he gave in a speech on April 11, 1958.

Speaking that day to the Reciprocity Club in Washington, D.C., the then-retired president said: “A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”

It’s a funny line. But when you know the context, you find that Truman was making a serious point about the pragmatic business of being an effective politician and running a government.

Here’s the full quote, as recorded in the April 12, 1958 edition of The New York World Telegram & Sun:

“I’m proud that I’m a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead ten or fifteen years.”

Truman’s remark was a take-off on an earlier famous quotation by another politician, Thomas Brackett Reed.

Reed was a Congressman from Maine who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1889 to 1891 and again from 1895 to 1899.

In 1892, he received a letter from a citizen who asked him: “What is a statesman?”

By the way, there’s another famous quote by Harry Truman that’s linked to the date April 11.

On April 11, 1951, Truman announced his decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur as commander of U.S. forces in Korea, after MacArthur publicly disagreed with Truman’s policy of limiting the expansion of the Korean War.

“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

The song that became the Confederate states’ anthem at the beginning of the Civil War is popularly known as “Dixie.”

There are a number of ironies about this famous “Southern” song. One is that it was written by a Northerner — Ohio-born minstrel musician Daniel Decatur Emmett.

In the late 1850s, Emmett was a musician and songwriter for Bryant’s Minstrels, a popular blackface minstrel troupe in New York City.

Emmett had a knack for writing catchy songs, such as “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Old Dan Tucker.”

Dan Bryant, leader of Bryant’s Minstrels, asked Emmett to write a new “walkaround song,” a lively song that could be used to close shows and be performed on the street to attract customers to the theater where the group played, Mechanics’ Hall on Broadway.

Emmett rose to the occasion by writing a song that used and helped popularize a nickname for America’s Southern states, “Dixie Land,” sometimes given as “Dixie’s Land” or just “Dixie” for short.

On April 4, 1859, Bryant’s Minstrels premiered the song in a show at Mechanics’ Hall. The printed playbill called it “Dixie’s Land.” The sheet music published in 1860 used the title “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land.”

Like other blackface minstrel songs, the original words were written with grammar and phonetic spellings designed to sound like an uneducated Southern slave might talk:

“I wish I was in de land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land! In Dixie Land whar I was born in, Early on one frosty mornin’, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land! Den I wish I was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray! In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand. To lib an’ die in Dixie. Away, Away, Away down South in Dixie. Away, Away, Away down South in Dixie.”

The song became highly popular in both northern and southern states during the next two years.

In the South, the lyrics were altered to take on an even more militaristic tone and adopted as a Confederate anthem.

On February 18, 1861, not long before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, “Dixie” was played at the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Throughout the Civil War, it was sung with patriotic fervor by Southern troops and civilians.

Dan Emmett, a loyal Union man, was dismayed by the Confederacy’s use of his song. He reportedly told a fellow musician “If I had known to what use they were going to put my song, I will be damned if I’d have written it.”

In the decades after the Civil War, “Dixie” regained some of it’s former nationwide popularity — at least among white Americans.

But to many African Americans, the song’s image of happy “darkies” who love their lot as slaves on a Southern plantation seemed (and still seems) absurd and offensive.

In an NPR story about the song, University of Mississippi historian Charles Reagan Wilson noted that during civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s: “[Blacks] would sing a song like ‘We Shall Overcome’ or ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’...But then opponents of integration and black rights would sing ‘Dixie’ as a kind of counter-song asserting white privilege and white supremacy.”

The historic uses of the song make the epitaph on Emmett’s headstone in his hometown of Mount Vernon, Ohio, ironic in itself. It reads:

DANIEL DECATUR 1815–1904 WHOSE SONG “DIXIE LAND” INSPIRED THE COURAGE AND DEVOTION OF THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE AND NOW THRILLS THE HEARTS OF A REUNITED NATION.

Perhaps even more ironic is the possibility that Emmett learned “Dixie” from members of the Snowden family, a family of free blacks who lived near the Emmett family’s farm in Ohio.

The Snowdens had their own musical group, the Snowden Family Band, who performed for black and white audiences from the mid- to late-1800s. Dan Emmett knew the Snowdens and is said to have played music with them.

According to Snowden family tradition, Emmett learned “Dixie” from Ben and Lou Snowden.

Long before that book was published in 2003, some local Ohioans were already convinced.

In 1976, the African American members of a local American Legion Post paid to have a new headstone placed on the joint gravesite of Ben and Lou Snowden in Clinton, Ohio. It says simply: “THEY TAUGHT ‘DIXIE’ TO DAN EMMETT.”

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About Me

After retiring from forty years of work in the realm of public policy and politics, I now write three blogs (ThisDayinQuotes.com, QuoteCounterquote.com and MensPulpMags.com) and co-edit the Men's Adventure Library series of books published by New Texture (www.NewTexture.com). Those books — on Amazon here > bit.ly/RobertDeis — feature stories and artwork from my collection of more than 5,000 vintage men's pulp adventure magazines. I live near Key West with my beautiful wife, Barbara Jo, and our three dogs and five cats